Friday 3 October 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Friday 3 October 2008 19.01 EDT

There is really only one big story at the moment, and in a sense (as he would say, repeatedly, often closely followed by "as it were"), it began with Robert Peston. The BBC's business editor had been observing Northern Rock's balance sheets for a couple of years before he went on air at 8.30pm on September 13 2007, and announced that the country's fifth biggest bank was technically insolvent.

"What concerned me was this: here was a very basic business - it's a retail bank, it's taking in savers' money and it's providing mortgages - I mean there's nothing revolutionary or different or particularly ... innovative in any of that. Yet it was growing much, much, much faster than any of its competitors. And there are really only two ways in what you might call a mature, basic industry, to grow at that kind of speed. One is that you do actually find some incredible breakthrough - you're a car manufacturer and you invent some amazingly new low-pollution engine. Or you take excessive risks that other organisations aren't taking, and I looked at this business and I just thought this is a business that seems to be taking excessive risks. But for a couple of years I looked like a total idiot, because its share price kept going up and it seemed to be doing extremely well."

One suspects this is a sop to the niceties of self-deprecation: Peston does not seem to be someone much given to professional self-doubt. "Listen," he says, peremptorily, before embarking on a juggernaut of curiously emphasised explanation, accompanied by anything but eye contact: he squeezes them tight shut, or addresses a patch of ceiling, or his computer screen. Then says, "Look. It's very, very simple."

He may, as observers have pointed out over the two and a half years since he left a 23-year print journalism career to replace Jeff Randall, not be the most polished broadcaster. But he is aggressively confident and, once he gets past a certain sing-song throat-clearing, he can hardly talk fast enough to get it all out: Northern Rock (which won him a Royal Television Society award for scoop of the year); Lloyd TSB's plans to take over HBOS - another major scoop; the first post-announcement interview with HBOS's chief executive.

In the process Peston has acquired a certain degree of ubiquity and power. Financial journalism has a potential for circularity, in that a story about a failing bank, say, can spook the markets, thus creating another story, and so on. There have been what he calls "snide comments" (in the Mail on Sunday) that a couple of large trades went through minutes before he announced the HBOS story ("What you have to remember is that the share price of HBOS that morning had fallen absolutely spectacularly, OK? And it's quite normal in those circumstances - it just happens"), and he received flak when the news about Northern Rock was followed by the first run on a UK bank in 140 years - even though he made sure to say that the Bank of England was stepping in and there was no need to worry. He has been at the eye of the storm ever since.

When we meet, at BBC's White City, he has just had his first night off in days that begin at 6am, checking news websites and then doing Radio 4's Today programme, 5 Live, the 8am bulletins, the News channel, via an ISDN line from home - all punctuated with getting his 11-year-old son, Max, ready for school. His wife Siân Busby, a writer and a film-maker, takes over in the afternoons.

At the office Peston will do some phone reporting, then the One O'Clock News, sometimes the World at One, endless phone calls in the afternoon, maybe a trip to the City, then the News at Six, the 18:00 (on Radio 4), then the 10 O'Clock News, then "if I'm very unlucky Newsnight might want me, which I try not to do too often because that extra 20 minutes can make the difference between being completely shattered and just about being OK."

Although Peston didn't realise that Northern Rock, necessarily, was going to start the dominoes off, he says he already knew, by then, that there was a hurricane brewing in the markets. "I found myself in this odd position of basically being pretty clear in everything I sort of wrote and said that this was going to be damaging for all of us - but being at odds with lots of professional economists, because economists at that stage were still saying, 'Oh well, the economy's fine, it might slow down a bit, but there's nothing terribly important here.' This kind of phenomenon was so out of left-field, was so way beyond what anybody had seen in generations, decades, that they couldn't build it into their forecasting models. And not just city economists, or academic economists, but also the Treasury, got it spectacularly wrong."

So was Gordon Brown (about whom Peston wrote a book, Brown's Britain) just clueless all along? He thinks that's a bit unfair. "You know, economists are the great source of authority and information on this stuff. What are you supposed to do if you're chancellor or prime minister? Of course you listen to them."

He is, in fact, the son of an economist, the Labour peer Maurice Peston. But because his father was "a very, very good economist, and it would just be too much pressure," decided, early on, not to emulate him. He arrived at journalism after Balliol College, Oxford, via an uninspiring year in the City - "God, it's boring" - and a stint at Investor's Chronicle, where a friend worked. "So what started sort of slightly by accident became a vocation, really."

He has been, among other things, political editor and head of an investigations unit at the Financial Times; his last print job was as associate editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Along the way he has acquired a much-envied contacts book and a reputation for cards-close-to-the-chest, sharp-elbowed ambition. After some prodding, he admits he left the FT partly "because I got promoted to a job I found fantastically boring" - and partly because the chief executive suggested he might be in the running for the job of editor. But he saw that the two other candidates had much more experience, and thought, "There's no way I'm going to be editor, so why should I stay?"

Does he think Brown's a safe pair of hands now? He laughs, cites BBC impartiality, and hedges. "What people tend to do in a period of crisis - and there's no doubt this is a period of crisis - people often stick with the person they know. What I would say is that this is a big opportunity for Gordon Brown." And what Brown, who perhaps has been a "bit naive", is now dealing with is "more than a theoretical possibility" of a full-blown depression, probably "quite a bad recession", and a redrawing of the financial firmament - which, "in many ways, is a very, very good thing. I think there's a sense in which all of us, to a certain extent, were seduced by property prices. A house is somewhere to live in. It's not a source of wealth." Peston believes the crisis might force us to learn to save again - and he agrees that financial institutions will have to work hard to regain our trust.

"But there are a number of other huge trends here. Look. The moral authority, that America can lecture the world on the best way to run their economy, has been shot to pieces. And that will have a profound impact on, you know, the way countries run their economies, on the way that institutions like the IMF and the World Bank work, because basically, if you live in a developing economy, you're just going to say, 'We're not going to take any lessons from you!'"

And then there's the vast indebtedness of countries such as the US and Britain, set against "all the wealth that has accumulated in China, in the Middle East, and Russia - that shifts the balance of financial power massively in their direction. I mean, if the Chinese got their act together, and they wanted to, they could actually, at this moment, buy the entire US banking system. They could just buy it. Which is an extraordinary thing - it's something that none of us could have predicted a few years ago." It's also not that long ago that London was celebrating its trumping of New York as the financial centre of the world; that hubris is now just a memory.

Peston was passed over for the City editorship of the Daily Telegraph, according to a recent column by the former Sunday Telegraph editor Sarah Sands, because he wasn't clubbable enough; was "too clever, tricky fastidious and serious" - these are, she said, "his defining strengths".

"Look," he says. "It's patently obvious that I'm not the most clubbable person. I've never been the guy who goes down the pub after work with the rest of the guys from the office. Journalism - it's not quite as bad as it was, but when I was younger, particularly in the 80s, the pub was an unbelievably important gathering place for hacks. And I do think it is probably the case that there is a slight aloofness to me - I'm sure that it didn't do me any good in terms of things like being editor of this or that - I think that must be right. Because in the end it's the job I love - I do love the story."

It looks as though he's found as much story as he could ever wish for.